Thursday 19 November 2015

Mary Reid Kelley’s This Is Offal is inspired by Thomas Hood’s 1844 poem The Bridge of Sighs in which the narrator laments the apparent suicide of a young woman, whose body he pulls from the Thames.

“This Is Offal traverses in tragicomic form the most serious and persistent of human disasters: suicide. In the performance, a pathologist uncovers and examines the body of a woman, whose own organs speak their confusion, discontent, and misunderstanding of her suicide in a riotous wordplay-filled dialogue. As the actual speakers in the drama, the liver, stomach, intestines and other organs signify the ‘offal’ of the film’s title and the ‘awful’ irrevocability of the act, which they protest. By enacting Camus’ philosophy of the absurd as a counter to suicide, This Is Offal also satirizes a long fascination with the beautiful, dead, silent woman as subject for art: from innumerable examples in Victorian poetry to contemporary autopsy-centric television shows. The female body in This Is Offal is decidedly un-silent, yet as her own organs argue over what happened, they also deny the hope of a rational, scientific explanation for the most tragic and motivationally complex of human actions.”—Mary Reid Kelley, October 2015.

Performance Room is a series of performances commissioned and conceived using online space as its primary medium. The performances themselves take place at Tate Modern but are filmed and broadcast live via YouTube to be experienced by an audience worldwide. The performance is followed by a Q&A with the curator Catherine Wood at 08:32 including questions and comments from the audience received via Tate's YouTube, Twitter and Facebook profiles.

Live streamed from Tate Modern at Thursday 19 November 2015, 20.00 (GMT) exclusively to audiences online. Part of the series BMW Tate Live 2015: Performance Room.

About

Bulegoa z/b in Bilbao, Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution in Amsterdam, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Playground Festival (STUK arts centre and M Museum) in Leuven, and Tate Modern in London collaborate in Corpus, an international network for commissioning performance-related work.

Bulegoa z/b in Bilbao, Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution in Amsterdam, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Playground Festival (STUK arts centre and M Museum) in Leuven, and Tate Modern in London collaborate in Corpus, an international network for commissioning performance-related work.

These institutions, diverse in scale, character and history, share a longstanding interest in, and engagement with performance. Sharing experiences, ideas, and (re)sources, Corpus aims to invest in the practice of performance and embraces its many connotations and varied intellectual kinships. Associated partners to Corpus are: CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, Casa do Povo in São Paulo, La Ferme du Buisson in Noisiel, The Kitchen in New York, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Gallery at REDCAT in Los Angeles, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw.

Corpus was founded in 2012 by the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Brétigny, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Playground Festival (STUK arts centre and M Museum) and Tate Modern.

Corpus operates within a two-year rhythm, in which around twelve new works are commissioned. Its structure assists artists in developing work over time and will allow works to evolve in repertory. Corpus wants to create conditions for artists to experiment, speculate, or revisit ideas. Process and presentation are considered to be on equal footing, and the evolution of the series of works is considered as a part of the whole project. The collaboration between the partners thus creates new leverage in terms of both the specific and heterogeneous needs of performance.

The name of the network is chosen for its meaning of ‘collection’, and refers to both a ‘body of institutions’ and a ‘body of works’. The name Corpus also stresses the body as an emblem of performance. In the current flux of developments in performance—the revival of its legacies, the proliferation of an extended notion of this discipline, and an added connotation of ‘achievement’ in a socio-economical sense—the importance of the fundamental component in this discourse, the body, the corpus, will be reiterated. At risk of appearing essentialist, Corpus wants to re-open discussions of ‘the body’, in relation to notions of the ‘live’—and ‘death’—in performance.

In Corpus’ first phase, projects have been realized with Orla Barry, Tim Etchells (i.c.w. FormContent), Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Emily Roysdon, as well as research projects on Laboratoire Agit-Art and Isidoro Valcárcel Medina.